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We connect leading journalists from all over Asia with one another, with colleagues and partners in Germany as well as other locations in Europe to communicate and exchange ideas. We organize conferences for aspiring and professional journalists such as the KAS Mobile Journalism Conference Asia – the first ever conference in Asia about mobile reporting.
One focus of our activity is the strengthening of investigative journalism in the region. The regional investigative journalists conference Uncovering Asia emerged from our partnership with the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN). Furthermore, as the Media Programme of the political foundation, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, we deal with the latest trends and problem areas in political communication through one of our conferences, the Asian Conference for Political Communication (ACPC) – with a clear focus on Asia.
Through our initiative and over twenty years of financial support, the Asia News Network (ANN) was created, an association of over twenty English-language daily newspapers from different countries in Asia, which support each other in reporting on the most important events in the region.
We can look back on a longstanding partnership with the Asian Center for Journalism (ACFJ) located at the Ateneo De Manila University in Manila, Philippines, from which our scholarship program, the Adenauer Fellowship for Media and Communication arose. We support and promote young, talented aspiring journalists through the Adenauer Fellowship for Media and Communication.
The overarching goal of our work is to promote and support the Asian media institutions and journalists in the development of professional journalistic standards in the region, to support young journalists as best as possible on their way into journalism and to advocate and promote the importance of the media as an integral part of democratic and liberal societies.
Konrad Adenauer was the first Chancellor (Head of federal government) of the Federal Republic of Germany under the CDU, the Christian Democratic Party (1949-1963). Having experienced the devastating damage of World War II, his politics strove to a united Europe. The foundational policies set during his term as Chancellor continue to shape the internal structure and foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany today.
Born 1876 into a family of civil servants, Konrad Adenauer was first serving as the Mayor of the German city Cologne, which used to be part of Prussia, from 1917-1933. During the World War II, Konrad Adenauer was removed from his position as Mayor of Cologne due to his strong aversion to the Nazi-regime. He survived the years of the war and was shortly appointed as Mayor of Cologne again, during which he helped to rebuild a largely-destroyed Cologne.
After the World War II, Konrad Adenauer focussed on the recovery of West-Germany. He has been credited for being relentless in his push for Germany’s integration into Western democracies, which was crucial for German-French reconciliation and greater European unity.
Konrad Adenauer was a key figure in the founding of European Communities, which later became the European Union. After the systemic genocide of six million Jews by the Nazi regime in World War II, he advocated to enshrine within the German state the protection of Jewish lives. Immediately after assuming his role as Chancellor, he formulated on behalf of the people of Germany the intention to “rectify the injustice committed against the Jewish people to the greatest extent possible given the millions of lives that have been destroyed forever.”
Under his leadership, Germany became a stable democracy. The CDU (Christian-Democratic Union), first led by Konrad Adenauer, was established after a sudden wave of party formations in 1945. It rose as “the Chancellor’s party” to become the most successful party in twentieth-century German history. Up until today, the CDU remains the party that has governed Germany for the longest term.